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twinkling stars, and then immediately crashed to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I thought the fun was over, he was right back at the little base again with the tiny flag, taking off one more time.
    The game was called Choplifter! and that exclamation point wasn’t just part of its name, it was also part of the experience of playing it. Choplifter! was thrilling. Again and again I watched these sorties fly out of our den and over a flat desert moon, shooting at, and being shot at by, enemy jets and enemy tanks. The helicopter kept landing and lifting off, as my father tried to rescue a flashing crowd of people and ferry them to safety. That was my earliest sense of my father: he was a hero.
    The cheer that came from the couch the first time that the diminutive helicopter touched down intact with a full load of miniature people was just a little too loud. My father’s head snapped to the window to check whether he’d disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes.
    I leaped into bed, pulled up the blanket, and lay perfectly still as my father’s heavy steps approached my room.
    He tapped on the window. “It’s past your bedtime, buddy. Are you still up?”
    I held my breath. Suddenly, he opened the window, reached into my bedroom, picked me up—blanket and all—and pulled me through into the den. It all happened so quickly, my feet never even touched the carpet.
    Before I knew it, I was sitting on my father’s lap as his copilot. I was too young and too excited to realize that the joystick he’d given me wasn’t plugged in. All that mattered was that I was flying alongside my father.

2
The Invisible Wall
    Elizabeth City is a quaint, midsize port town with a relatively intact historic core. Like most other early American settlements, it grew around the water, in this case around the banks of the Pasquotank River, whose name is an English corruption of an Algonquin word meaning “where the current forks.” The river flows down from Chesapeake Bay, through the swamps of the Virginia–North Carolina border, and empties into Albemarle Sound alongside the Chowan, the Perquimans, and other rivers. Whenever I consider what other directions my life might have taken, I think of that watershed: no matter the particular course the water travels from its source, it still ultimately arrives at the same destination.
    My family has always been connected to the sea, my mother’s side in particular. Her heritage is straight Pilgrim—her first ancestor on these shores was John Alden, the Mayflower ’s cooper, or barrelmaker. He became the husband of a fellow passenger named Priscilla Mullins, who had the dubious distinction of being the only single woman of marriageable age onboard, and so the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony.
    John and Priscilla’s Thanksgiving-time coupling almost never happened, however, due to the meddling of the commander of the Plymouth Colony, Myles Standish. His love for Priscilla, and Priscilla’s rejection of him and eventual marriage to John, became the basis of a literary work that was referenced throughout my youth, The Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (himself an Alden-Mullins descendant):
Nothing was heard in the room but the hurrying pen of the stripling,
    Busily writing epistles important, to go by the Mayflower,
    Ready to sail on the morrow, or next day at latest, God willing!
    Homeward bound with the tidings of all that terrible winter,
    Letters written by Alden, and full of the name of Priscilla,
    Full of the name and the fame of the Puritan maiden Priscilla!
    John and Priscilla’s daughter, Elizabeth, was the first Pilgrim child born in New England. My mother, whose name is also Elizabeth, is her direct descendant. Because the lineage is almost exclusively through the women, though, the surnames changed with nearly every generation—with an Alden marrying a Pabodie